Welcome to In Depth Defense. In Depth Defense LLC is a privately owned Information Security Consulting company owned and operated by Mark Baggett. In Depth Defense specializes in Penetration Testing and Incident Response. At this time In Depth Defense is not accepting any new client work, but we are happy to speak to you and point you to other resources in the community.

Mark Baggett has been active in Information Security for 18+ years. I've served in a variety of roles from software developer to CISO. You can find archives of older blog entries below and read my newer posts on http://www.pauldotcom.com, http://isc.sans.edu and http://pen-testing.sans.org

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Metasploit Visual Basic Payloads in action

John Strand turned me on to this at CDI in December. We were talking about my presentation on the effectiveness of antivirus in detecting metasploit payloads and he asked if I had done any testing on the visual basic payloads. At the time I had not, but now I have to agree with John's assersion that this is potentially a very scary and powerful feature. Metasploit payloads can easily be embedded in Microsoft Office Documents and, as you might expect if you've read my previous blogs, antivirus software does not detect the payloads. I made a video to demonstrate the creation and use of the payloads.

To mitigate these attacks you can use Group policy to set your Office Document Macro Security to HIGH. You could use the Medium setting if you work for that mythical company where users don't ignore security warnings. Here are some helpful links